Why it would be better if women's day did not exist?

The internet has variety of things, the good, bad and the ugly. It tells us the truth, facts, opinions, made up stories, and literally anything that exists or doesn’t exist.

8^th of march was celebrated as the international women’s day. And thus, followed it;  thousands of memes, quotes of pride, shame, fury and laughter. One of these that I happened to notice was a meme on Instagram which showed a large cheering crowd with “women’s day” written on top and just one man standing with “men’s day” written on it. When I happened to immediately diss that Instagram meme, the boy sitting next to me casually said, “But isn’t that true! Men’s day really does not get even half the importance as women’s day”. I am a sensitive person who gets irritated without explaining, who expects people around me to share all the ideologies that’s I have and who has tolerance of the size of a sand particle. I consider everybody to have grown in the same environment and with the same upbringing as me. So instead of calmly putting up my view (the very idea behind men’s day foolish) is , I ended up shouting at him, the point of which I’m sure, he still would not have understood. When I told him, that women need empowerment and that is why we have a day for them, but men are empowered enough already; the idea seemed abstract to him. The argument he put forward in return was so futile. He was quick to compare empowerment with dominance and just like those 50 years old uncles whose WhatsApp forwards are of jokes on their innocent wives’ lack of cooking skills, or brains or conceited nature, said, “Wives are more dominant everywhere”. Answers like these enrage me because this is not the environment, I wish to be in.

The mere existence of Women’s day is a matter of shame. It exists not because there is a day for everyone. It started because just 100 years ago that women’s suffrage took place even in superpowers like “The United States of America” which this dear friend of mine, knowingly or unknowingly, is so influenced by. Empowerment is needed because even today a 25 years old man would consider himself to be wiser than 50-year-old women. It is needed because one poor lady in a remote village somewhere is restricted to her suffocating kitchen, because her husband is not accountable to her, but she is accountable to him, because she cannot be autonomous. Social conditioning still exists not only based on the bodily abilities but other orthodox traditions although they make little sense.

Women need empowerment so that they can be dragged up to be at par with men, not so that they can replace men by where they stand now. When someone falls into a pit, they are given a ladder to come up to the surface. Now this does not mean that the people in the surface will complain that they weren’t given the ladder and therefore the system is partial. So, my dear classmate and all the men who complain about the women’s compartment in the train - you don’t need the ladder because you already stand on the surface and giving you one would just further increase the gap between you and the pit fallen women (same goes for the Dalits with reservation or the LGBTQ community). Giving women the social, political and economic pull is to bring them on the same line as men. So, as Gloria Steinem says, if there is any pull you need it is for you to say, “I can do whatever a woman can”.

So, when the angry “feminist men” complain about all the pressure of fulfilling all the expectations, it’s just the society’s conventional role playing that has gotten into their head through the internet.